What drives young Western men to leave everyone and everything behind and travel to Syria to become a Jihad fighter? The media portrays these boys as vulnerable and derailed. Is there another side to this picture? In order to understand why they feel called upon to pick up arms and leave everything they know behind, filmmaker Floor van der Meulen abandons her Western perspective to be able to see things through the eyes of the fighters. 

Awards & nominations

Twelve-year-old Azza is caught between two cultures – the liberal culture of her Dutch mother and the strict Islamic culture of her Egyptian father. She goes to an Islamic primary school and after the summer she will be going to grammar school, where hardly anyone wears a headscarf. Will she stay loyal to her father’s culture or will the headscarf go? 

In this series we follow nine children, and each of them is living with a father or mother with a special story. We meet with the nine-year-old Marit who shows us what it’s like to have a father (55) who does not recognize her anymore, due to the fact that he suffers from dementia. 

Nine-year-old Anuschka dreams about having a fantastic dress. Her father is getting married to stepmother Kitty, who has lived in their house for the past two years. But the family has hardly enough money to live on. Their situation is so bad that they have to go to the food bank. Will Anuschka get her bridesmaid’s dress? 